How to Hide WhatsApp Images and Videos from Gallery – 2 Easy Methods

Have you ever thought of removing or deleting your WhatsApp images from your phone so that it doesn’t appear in Gallery? Well If you have, here is the easiest way to hide WhatsApp images and videos from gallery without having to delete the images.

WhatsApp is the most popular instant messaging application on the planet. It has revolutionized how people connect with each other. People tend to use WhatsApp for making calls, video calls, sending messages, sending images and more. You can do so much using a single application.

Everybody who uses a smartphone would have WhatsApp installed on their phone. You have all your friends and family there and it’s the easiest way to connect with someone. One of the main features of WhatsApp is that it enables us to share media files like images and videos to other very easily. People just use the term “WhatsApp it to me” these days.

Why Hide WhatsApp Images

You have all your friends and family on WhatsApp and receive thousands of messages and medias. The majority of the files that people share on WhatsApp are images and videos. My WhatsApp Images folder alone has more than 2000 images. I don’t even know if I have seen them all.

People send all kinds of images in WhatsApp from memes, to stupid images, good morning messages etc. There can also be private images which you don’t want to make public. But all the images that is received in WhatsApp is visible in the Gallery.

Sometimes there can be appropriate images in the WhatsApp folder which shows up in gallery and it can be a bad thing if someone sees them. In my case, as I told I don’t have a clue what kind of images I can expect from all those contacts and groups I’m part of.

It’s always a good thing to Hide your WhatsApp images from gallery if you don’t want anybody to see images from WhatsApp.

How to Hide WhatsApp Images from Gallery?

WhatsApp Images and videos can be hidden from the phone’s gallery app by changing a setting in WhatsApp. The chat application has an option were we can turn of the visibility of the images and videos that we receive in WhatsApp.

Here is how you can access the visibility settings in WhatsApp and Hide WhatsApp images from gallery.

Hide WhatsApp Images from Particular group/individual from Gallery

This option can be used if you want to hide WhatsApp images from a particular WhatsApp group or contact from your gallery. If this option is used, there still will be WhatsApp media files appearing in the gallery, but the images from that particular person/group will not be visible.

Step 1: Open WhatsApp and Choose the person or group whose images/videos needs to be hidden from gallery.

Step 2: Click on the person/group and then scroll down to see the Media Visibility option.

Step 3: Click on the Media Visibility option and change it to No.

Now the new images that appear in that particular chat will not be visible in the phone’s gallery. But there’s a catch, have you seen that it is mentioned “new images” from the chat will not be visible in the phone’s gallery.

This means that the older images from the chat will be visible in the gallery, but the new ones will not be appearing in the phone’s gallery.

But if you want to hide all the images from gallery, follow along as we talk about that in the next section.

How to Hide WhatsApp Images from Gallery (All Contacts and Groups).

We have seen how to hide WhatsApp images and videos from particular contact/group from gallery above. Now if you want to hide all the images that is shared in WhatsApp from all the contacts and group, we can do that too. WhatsApp gives us an option to hide all the WhatsApp media files from the phone’s gallery.

Step 1: Open WhatsApp and go to Settings.

Step 2: Click on Chats option.

Step 3: You can see an option called Media Visibility. Click on the option and select No.

This way we can hide all the new WhatsApp images from appearing in the gallery. But this option will only hide the new images and videos from the gallery (the images that are received after we changes the media visibility option). The older images will still be visible in Gallery.

How to Completely Hide old and new WhatsApp images from Gallery

In this method we are going to completely hide all the WhatsApp images and videos from gallery. In the above mentioned method, only the images received after we changed the option will be hidden from the gallery, while the older images will be visible in the gallery.

For this we will be needing a file manager application.

Step 1: Download ES File Manager from Google Play Store.

Step 2: Open ES File Explorer. Go to Internal Storage > WhatsApp.

Step 3: Open Media > WhatsApp Images folder.

Step 4: Click on the 3 dot button on the top right and select New.

Step 5: Select File and name it “.nomedia” without the quotes and click Ok to create the file.

Step 6: You will be get a prompt that the file has been created successfully. But the file will not be visible. You can enable Show Hidden Files to see the .nomedia file we created.

WhatsApp Images are still appearing after doing the above steps?

If you are still able to see WhatsApp images even after following the above steps, do the following thing.

Check if the file created is “.nomedia” without spaces or capital letters and its not autocorrected by the keyboard.

Go to Settings > Applications and then Find Gallery app and Force Stop the application. Try now and you will be able to see that the WhatsApp images are now not visible in the Gallery.

If force stopping the Gallery app is not working, try clearing the Data of the gallery application and try opening it.

The .nomedia file tells that applications that there are no media files in the folder and so the application will skip scanning for images or videos in that particular folder. When the phone’s Gallery application scans the WhatsApp Images folder, it sees that .nomedia file and skip searching the folder for images. This is how WhatsApp Images are hidden from the gallery.

How to Unhide WhatsApp Images from Gallery

If at some point you want to show the WhatsApp images in gallery again, you can easily do that. We have created the .nomedia file which is preventing the gallery from searching the particular folder.

All we have to do is to delete the .nomedia file and we are done. The WhatsApp images will then start to appear in the gallery.

Step 3: Click on the menu button on the top left of ES File Explorer to open the menu. Scroll down and enable Show Hidden Files toggle.

Step 4: Delete the .nomedia file from the WhatsApp Images folder.

Step 5: Clear Cache of Gallery App from Settings.

How to stop WhatsApp from saving photos to Gallery

We say prevention is better than cure. Similarly you don’t have hide WhatsApp images if you didn’t download it in the first place. WhatsApp downloads and saves all the media files in the WhatsApp folder on our phone. You have an option to whether you would like to download media automatically or not.

You can configure the media download option to your liking. If you don’t want all the images to be downloaded automatically, you can do that. Once the option is set to manual, you can choose whether to download the image or not.

Here is how you can stop WhatsApp from Saving photos automatically:

Step 1: Open WhatsApp and Go to Settings.

Step 2: Go to Data and Storage Usage settings.

Step 3: Under the Media Auto Download section, untick all the options of “When using mobile data” and “When connected on Wi-Fi”.

Now whenever you receive an image or video, you can chose to download it or not. In this way you can be sure that nothing appropriate is being saved to your phone and thus its not visible in the gallery as well.

Final Thoughts

If you need to hide WhatsApp images or videos from the gallery, you can simply do this with few steps. If there are inappropriate images or some images that you don’t want to e visible to others, you can hide WhatsApp images from appearing in gallery using two methods mentioned above.

The second method will be helpful if you want to hide the complete WhatsApp images. The steps involved is very simple and easy. You can also unhide the images when you need to.

Loves anything tech. Loves writing about tech and share the things he knows to the world. Interests include Gaming, Web Designing and is a die hard Pop Music Fan. Fav include Anne Marie, Ed Sheeran. Team #Android.

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